In the land of SADDLE-BAGS 

Reprinted from 

The Missionary Review of the World 

New York 



\r 



F^° 1^.1903 



J13 



1901.] IN THE LAND OF SADDLE-BAGS. 21 

IN THE LAND OF SADDLE-BAGS. 

The Protestant People of Appalachian America.* 
by rev. "william goodell frost, ph.d. 

President of Berea College, Kentucky. 

On a modern map we see a well-defined territory, comprising the 
western portions of the Atlantic states, northern Georgia and Ala- 
bama, and eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, which may be said to 
constitute one of the natural grand divisions of our continent. This 
region has great diversity of climate, altitude, and surface, but it has 
all one striking characteristic — it is a land of saddle-bags. One great 
limitation confronts its inhabitants — they can travel only on horse- 
back. It requires more effort for the average American Highlander 
to reach the capital of his state than for a resident of Chicago to visit 
London. 

It seems like a surprising geological oversight that this territory 
has no kindly arms of the sea, no inland lakes, and no navigable 
streams. The lack of waterways renders it more inaccessible than any 
mountain district in Europe. Bridle-paths following the course of 
streams, and circuitous wagon roads threading the "gaps" and trav- 
ersing the larger valleys, form its only avenues of communication with 
the world. 

But this condition of affairs was not so evident to new settlers in 
America four and five generations ago. To them all "the western 
country " was a wilderness, and no maps existed which could reveal 
the difference between western New York, with its lakes and the great 
coming Erie Canal, and western Virginia. Besides, the first settlers 
found very good valley land in the Southern mountains — ample 
domains for the first generation. It was only with the increase of popu- 
lation that it became necessary to cultivate the thinner soil and 
steeper sides of the " knobs." 

This then is the unwritten history of the first comers. There were 
the Scotch-Irish, most numerous of all, with their well-known char- 
acteristics of temi3erameiit and principle. And tlieii came the English 



♦The record of Protestant emigrratious from Europe to America is necessarily obscure and 
defective. They did not go out with a flourish of trumpets. The Huguenots of France melted 
from sight, taking with them the brain and nerve of the nation, and were scattered over both 
hemispheres. Germany liad its evictions and shift ings of population. England and Scot- 
laud have been continuously drained. But these great movements liave been incon- 
spicuous. Secrecy was often necessary to safety, and when the great cause seemed 
to fail protesting churches and liouseholds acted independently and resolutely, and 
set their faces toward some land of new promise. They disappeared before the face of the 
oppressor, and fulfilled a Divine purpose in a new and larger world. The Mayflower company 
is an example, most fortunately put on record, showing the trials and aspirations of the 
families of a Protestant exodus whose limits no historian has yet defined. It is the purpose 
of the present article to show how one great stream of this Protestant migration has 
been lost in the wilderness for thrice forty years.— W. G. F. 



22 THE MISSIONARY REVIEW OF THE WORLD. [JailUarj 

dissenters (Cromwell himself once engaged passage to America). The 
town and family names of the west counties of England which were 
most concerned in the ill-starred uprising of "the Protestant Duke" 
Monmouth are to be found to-day in eastern Kentucky and Tennes- 
see. The German contingent was much smaller, and came mainly 
through the southwest valleys from Pennsylvania. The Huguenot 
strain made its mark in men like John Sevier in Tennessee. 

Many of these adventurous exiles tarried for a generation in the 
coast colonies, and then "went west" under the same great impulse 
which affected all Americans after the Eevolution. A smaller number 
seem to have found their way almost at once into the hills. 

The influence of slavery showed itself in the first half of this cen- 
tury in driving many of these liberty loving families into the moun- 
tains, and in walling them up there with a barrier of social repulsion. 
The line between mountain and lowland came to represent diversity 
of type and ideas, animosity eveh, and so made more effective the iso- 
lation of the mountain folk. 

OUR CONTEMPORARY AKCE9T0RS. 

And now what has been the unwritten history of the descendants 
of these Protestant dissenters in the obscurity of their mountain 
home during the last hundred years ? The answer must be that, 
compared with what has been going on in the great modern world, 
nothing has happened to these solitary dwellers in the hills. They 
took into their mountain valleys the civilization of the colonial period 
— and that is the prevailing type among them still. To understand 
the mountain people of to-day one needs a little historic imagination. 
With this he will perceive that most of Avhat a superficial observer 
would call their faults are really honest survivals from the times of 
our forefathers. The colonial dialect, with its strong Sdxou flavor, 
and scores of words like hricketij, sorry, soon for early, jxiclc for 
carry, etc., is one of the first discoveries. As we become more intimate 
with them we find that unlettered dames can repeat long ballads 
from the old Scotch and English anthologies — ballads Avhicli refer 
to " the Turkisli lady " and other subjects of Crusading times, with 
odd variations to adapt them to their far-off American home ! 

And the colonial condition of arts and sciences still survives here 
in large degree. Splint- bottomed chairs, such as went to the attic in 
western New York fifty years ago, homespun bedcovers which are 
coveted by fashionable ladies to-day, grease lamps, burning lard with 
floating wick, hand-mills which turn out a delicious grist for break- 
fast cornpones, blacksmiths who can also tinker clocks, extract teeth, 
preach, and " raise a crap " — these are a few of the externals which 
lead us to characterize the mountaineers as " our contemporary 
ancestors ! " 



1901.] 



IN THE LAND OF SADDLE-BAGS. 



23 



Passing beyond externals we find a colonial hospitality, a colonial 
disregard of the sacredjiess of human life, and a colonial religion of 
literalism and fatalism. And it is here that we find sad divergence 
from the Protestant characteristics of the earlier time. Pioneer con- 
ditions prevented the maintenance of the educational standard so 
essential to Protestantism. Preachers were scarce, and they could 
have meetings but once a month. They had the civilization of the 
colonial period, but that civilization did not include the common 
school, the division of labor, or the full idea of toleration. Preachers 
were scarce and they began to '*'put up with" men who had little or 
no education. This was the fatal fall, for Protestantism without in- 
telligence is impossible. No Protestant people has ever been so des- 




A MOUNTAIN STILL IN KENTUCKY MAKING APPLE-JACK. 



titute of educated leaders. That a man should not know the mean- 
ing of Easter, and preach upon the story of Queen Esther on Easter 
Day, is more amusing than harmful perhaps, but when he begins to 
boast that he preaches without study, and without "taking thought," 
so that when he gets up in the pulpit " the devil himself don't know 
what's a-going to be said," we cannot smile. It is no wonder that 
such men neglect " the weightier matters of the law " and give their 
main efforts to obscure and controverted points. A solemn debate as 
to whether the " Missionary Baptist " or the " Southern Methodist " 
is the only true church has occurred within a few miles of Berea. 
Resolutions denouncing missions as unwarrantable interferences with 
the "decrees" of Providence, and Sunday-schools as unauthorized by 



24 THE MissioNART REVIEW OF THE WORLD. [January 

Scripture, are passed by ministerial conventions every summer. Of 
course these views are not held by all the numerous denominations in 
the mountains, but those who do profess a belief in missions and Sun- 
day-schools too often fail to contribute to the one or sustain the other. 

And meanwhile the people are without the true incentives of the 
Gospel. It is pathetic to find an intelligent young teacher complain- 
ing that he can not find out what Christianity is, or what the Lord 
really wants of him, altho he has listened to preacliing more or less 
all his life. And it is still more pathetic to find an aged woman who 
has brought up a large family of children, faithfully training them in 
the best of all the traditions with which she is acquainted, and Avho 
yet says with a quaver in her voice, " I haint never heard no call of 
the speerit. I haint nary sign that I'm one of the elect." 

The morality of the mountain people, too often quite separable 
from their religion, is greatly varied, tho on the whole much better 
than would be expected. Their conventionalities are not the same 
as those of our towns and cities, but they have moral standards to 
which they adhere with rigid insistence. In one valley it sometimes 
happens that the leading families remove, as did the Lincolns, to 
some western state, and society collapses. The tales of extreme 
degradation told by travelers may be true, but they need not be 
accepted as typical. 

These then are the striking characteristics of this great population: 
First, the absence of the distinctively modern ideas and habits of 
thought. Second, a survival of many customs and ideas which belong 
to past centuries. And third, a certain pathetic shyness mingled 
with a proud sensitiveness as they realize that somehow they are at a 
disadvantage in the presence of " strangers," or " furriuers," as visit- 
ors from the outside world are often called. 

THE llECOED OF THE MOIJNTAINEEKS. 

Aitho thus isolated from their fellow-countrymen, the mountain 
people have contributed their share to our national greatness. A 
number of Avriters have recently been rescuing from oblivion their 
Revolutionary record. In the same county where Berea College now 
stands Daniel Boone was besieged in his fort by a company of Indians 
under command of a British officer, and summoned to surrender in 
the name of King George. It Avas a horde of stalwart hunters from 
Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Carolina mountains who administered 
a crushing defeat to the British forces at King's Mountain, and set in 
motion the current of events which culminated at Yorktown. In the 
war of 1812, New Orleans was defended by men with long rifles from 
the hills whose powder horns were filled with stuff of their own man- 
ufacture, the saltpeter having come from caves in the mountains. 

In the Civil War their services were still more marked. The great 



1901.] 



IN THE LAND OF SADDLE-BAGS. 



25 



mountain region was not tenanted by slaveholders. Its inhabitants 
were not the "poor whites " degraded by competition with slave labor, 
but a self-respecting yeomanry — really the best middle class the 
South possesses. They owned land and had the independence of 
spirit which belongs to possessors of the soil. Neither the northern 
nor tlie southern leaders seem to have taken account of the mountain 
element, but they were speedily reminded of it by the action of West 
Virginia in seceding from secession, and the vigorous opposition 
of eastern Tennessee simply showed the temper of the whole region. 
Union soldiers were actually enlisted in the mountains of Ala- 
bama and the Carolinas. Kentucky Avas held in the Union by 
its mountain counties. And the transfer of 200,000 fighting men 






A PRIMITIVE HOME OF A MOUNTAINEER. 



from the forces counted upon for the Confederacy, to the Union side., 
was a mighty make-weight in the scales of civil war. Every move- 
ment of the Confederates from the east to the west was hindered by 
this island of loyal sentiment. The Union soldiers who in other parts 
of the South were guided by the faithful Negro, and assisted in tiieir 
escape from southern prisons by his friendly aid, received like services 
from the mountaineers. Their loyalty is the more to be admired 
because it was loyalty in the immediate presence of the enemy; a loy- 
alty that cost them dearly in the breaking of cherished associations, 
the destruction of property, and the sacrifice of many lives. And it 
is a service to the nation which has never been fitly commemorated 
nor recorded. The monntain regiments had no badges, poets, or his- 



26 THE MISSIONARY REVIEW OF THE WORLD. [January 

torians. They dispersed to tlieir scattered homes and it is only at the 
fireside that their deeds of valor find commemoration to-day. 

It is to be remarked that for many mountain men the war was an 
education. They were carried out of the narrow circle of previous 
experience and brought into contact with men from other sections, 
and returned to their homes with larger ideas than their fathers or 
grandfathers had ever had. 

That the native vigor and capacity of these people has been obscured 
but not extinguished is shown by the record of those few individuals 
who have made their way to the region of larger opportunities. Stone- 
wall Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Admiral Farragut (whose mother's 
name was Mclven), Munsey, the great Methodist orator of Baltimore, 
Rev. George J. Burchett, of Oregon, Commander Maynard, of Spanish 
war fame. Parson Brownlow, Col. Robert Clay Crawford (" Osman 
Pasha") are examples of the sterling abilities of the mountain people. 

BEREA AKD EDUCATION. 

It requires but little reflection to discern the great value of this 
vigorous, liberty-loving, Protestant pojoulation in the heart of the 
South. It is a population more purely American than can be found in 
any other section. It has the un jaded nerves which can steady the 
nation's thought, as well as the giant frames which can accelerate the 
nation's industries. If it can be touched with education it will be an ele- 
ment which will contribute largely to the success of every good cause. 

The present writer was brought in contact with the mountain jieo- 
ple by accident in West Virginia in 1884. Some years later he was 
providentially called to the presidency of Berea College, and he has 
felt that he was specially commissioned for befriending our country- 
men in Apj)alachian America. The question of the means and metbods 
by which the unfavorable conditions of this vast region shall be over- 
come, and the native strength and character of the people developed, 
is an important and perplexing one. It is a piece of educational and 
Christian work unlike almost any other which can be mentioned. 

Berea's program for the mountain population is based upon a few 
principles which, tho often neglected in such work, seem well nigh 
self-evident. 

In the first place, we are undertaking to reach them as friends 
rather than as missionaries. Our great analogy is the work which has 
been done in pioneer communities in the West. While the West was 
passing through the "stump and log cabin" period, it received sub- 
stantial assistance from the older and richer portions of the laud. The 
West had a liberal sprinkling of educated leaders, and abundant ties 
of family and commerce with the East, so that its development was 
natural and rapid. These educated leaders and these lines of 
acquaintance with tlic outside world the mountain region lacks, and 



1901.] 



IN THE LAND OF SADDLE-BAGS. 



27 



it is our effort to supply them. Everything wliich promotes acquaint- 
ance with that which is best in the national life will help them in the 
most effective way. 

A second principle is that we should seek to develop and encoui-- 
age all that is best in their present 
life and surroundings. We should 
not impose upon them our ways 
of thinking, in a wholesale 
manner, but build upon the best 
elements of their OAvn life and 
thought. We are encouraging the 
fireside industries which are so 
well adapted to tlieir present con- 
dition, and trying to make them 
proud of their best examples of 
log architecture. The exchange 
of honest homespun and substan- 
tial log houses for flimsy " fac- 
tory " and wretched board shanties 
is not always to be commended. 
AVe shall not seek to set them in 
motion toward the great cities, 
but try to show them how they 
may enjoy all that is possible of 
comfort and culture where they 
are. 

This implies a great deal of 
careful adaptation in all our 
work. We can not bring them 
the courses of study or methods 
of a northern school, but must, at 
every point, inquire for the stand- 
point of the learner and the actual 
circumstances and conditions in 
which his new knowledge is to be 
applied. 

Another part of our program is to work in an undenominational 
way. Berea College was led to this position by its providential history, 
and we have every reason to rejoice in it. Like Hampton, Berea was 
aided in its early struggles by the American Missionary Association, 
which was then a nonsectarian society. There has been a growing 
feeling that the activities of Christian people ought to be carried on 
more largely in a cooperative manner — that there is a waste of money 
and of moral power when different religious bodies carry on separate 
activities, ignoring, and often opposing one another, among a scattered 




A MOUNTAIN BOY, 

Dressed in a suit of lioiiiespnn linen. 



28 



THE MISSIONARY REVIEW OF THE WORLD. 



[January 



population. We are seeking to cooperate with all Christian churches 
and to emphasize the' great principles of Christianity on which all 
followers of our Lord agree. 

The fact that Berea was founded with signs and wonders before 
the war gives it an influence and an opportunity which are altogether 
unique. It Avas the outgrowth of the anti-slavery sentiment of the 
South. Gen. Cassias M. Clay noted the circumstance that the moun- 
tain people had land but did not have slaves, and he located a strong- 
hold of free speech among them. Eev. John G. Fee was the prophet 
of the enterprise, and the men who mobbed and persecuted him so 
uniformly came to violent deaths that he was regarded with supersti- 
tious awe. Prof. J. A. E. Rogers supplied the educational element, 
and the school [speedily acquired a momentum which even civil war 
could not interrupt. 

The college early took the ground that the only test for admission 
should be one of character, and has for thirty years admitted colored 
students on the same basis as white students. Last year out of a total 
of some seven hundred students about one hundred and fifty were 
colored. This of course implies no social comjiulsion. No student is 
forced to associate with any who are distasteful to him. But the in- 
stitution welcomes all 
alike. AVhite and colored 
students do not room 
together. In the literary 
societies colored boys are 
frequently elected to 
office "on tlieir merits." 
There has been no tend- 
ency toward intermar- 
riage. These arrange- 
ments make no more 
disturbance here than in 
the great schools outside 
the territory which was 
cursed by slavery. And 
it is a good element in 
the education of any 
Southern boy to have him 
see his colored brothers 
treated like men. Much 
to the surprise of many 
good people this arrangement has never jiroduced a collision or a 
scandal. And the relations of the two races are more friendly, pure, 
and satisfactory in the sphere of Berea's influence than anywhere 
else in the South. 




A MOUNTAIN GIRL ARRIVING AT BEREA. 

She wears a lionicspun "linsoy" dress and a 

" bougliten " jacket. 



1901.1 IN THE LAND OF SADDLE-BAGS. 29 

A brief description of our actual arrangements for trying to carry 
out the principles above outlined may be more interesting and sug- 
gestive than a statement of the principles themselves. 

Our largest department is the Normal, training teachers for the 
new and struggling public schools. We have just called to the head 
of this department Prof. John W. Dinsmore of Nebraska. 

Next in iuiportance comes the Industrial Department. We have 
not had means nor occasion for opening so many forms of industry 
as at Hampton. Our girls have sewing, cooking, and nursing; our 
young men have printing, carpentering, and farming. The Depart- 
ment of Agriculture and Forestry is exceedingly practical. The 
mountain people were the best hunters, and have exterminated the 
game. Their next resource was lumber, and they have cut deeply into 
the forests. They must now be taught to get a living out of the land, 
and to preserve the forests, which ought to be a source of perpetual 
wealth. Our Prof. S. C. Mason has just returned from a sojourn in 
Europe, where he has studied the metliods of forestry and mountain 
agriculture, and he will be in position to make suggestions which will 
enrich every household in Appalachian America. 

Besides the departments already named, we have a regular Acad- 
emy and College course, and the students in these courses are actively 
engaged in religious work in the college and its vicinity. 

UEREA EXTENSION" WORK. 

Most marked of all adaptations for this peculiar field is the " exten- 
sion " work, carried on by traveling libraries, horse-back lecturers, and 
tent meetings, which cover a wide region. Great industrial confer- 
ences like those held at Tuskegee are impracticable for the mountain 
people. We gather five or six thousand of them for one day at com- 
mencement time, where we present them with a full program, but we 
cannot entertain such a congregation over night, nor can they be long 
absent from their homes. But the extension work reaches them in 
their homes, and is specially valuable in awakening an interest among 
those who are not yet sufficiently enlisted to undertake a long journey 
for the sake of attending any conferences. The extension work 
brings to them what the social settlement brings in a great city, '•' not 
alms, but a friend." A tent meeting will begin with an hour of Bible 
exposition; after a recess there will be an hour on some phase of 
education. In the afternoon the first session may be given to a farm- 
ers' conference, and a second hour to domestic science. At night the 
young people will gather for singing-school, which will be followed by 
a sermon or a stereopticon lecture which will bring the great world 
into their little valley. We must be careful of each word spoken at 
all of these extension meetings, for it will be cherished and talked 
over, and our fellow-laborer who speaks to the same people five years 
later will have it repeated to him as something important ! 



30 



THE MISSIONARY REVIEW OF THE WORLD. [January 




A BEREA STUDENT AND HIS MOUNTAIN SCHOOL. 



We feel that the work is just in its beginnings, though it has gone 
far enough to bring us great encouragement. When traversing a new- 
road we are naturally on the watch for tlie most comfortable house in 
which to spend the night, and when we find a home distinguished for 
its good fences, ample porch, and inviting interior, we are very apt to 
find that the father or mother of the household was a Berea student 
in former years. 

The atmospliere of political conventions and court-house crowds, as 
well as of teachers' institutes and Sunday-school gatherings, has been 
improved over a wide area by the influence of Berea students. 

No one can ride a hundred miles through this region, up and down 
the banks of streams, preach to the rosy-cheeked and stalwart young 
men and women who gather at " early candle light," and enjoy the 
hospitality of the great fireside, without realizing that it is an urgent 
matter that these Protestant people should be made sharers in the 
better elements of modern Christian civilization. The present writer 
would not be justified in taking time from his immediate engagements 
to prepare tliis article if it were not with the assurance that he should 
thereby enlist more prayers and support for the enlargement of such a 
work. In many localities there is an opportunity to exert a molding 
influence now which cannot be exerted five years hence. Eelentless 
change is knocking at the door of every mountain cabin. The reck- 



less vanguard of civilization easily corrupts a people whose morality is 
not grounded in intelligent religion. It is an urgent necessity that 
we establish Sunday-schools in advance of the lumber camp and the 
coal mine. It will make a prodigious difference in 1920 whether Berea 
had a thousand students in 1900 or only five hundred. If we can quickly 
gather a large multitude of these young people, though we hold them 
but a single year, we shall teach them what education means; we shall 
give them a better idea of religion, and shall send them back with hope 
and an upward trend in their lives. Twenty years hence their children 
will begin to come to us and they will come from homes which can 
give a more intelligent cooperation. After that, progress will roll on 
with its own momentum. No Christian enterprise can yield more sure 
and swift returns. If we do as much toward giving them "a start"' 
as we have done for an equal population in the West, the mountain 
people will help us and our children in every good cause. 



EDITORIAL NOTE. 

{Missionary Review of the World, January, 1901.) 

We are glad to present this account of the condition and needs of 
the mountaineers of the Appalachian Range in America, and the 
work that Berea College, Kentucky, is endeavoring to do for them. 
Berea is undertaking large things, and consequently its needs are 
great. An endowment fund has been started successfully, but the 
need for money for current expenses is pressing, especially since 
President Frost is obliged by the exigencies of the work, and by his 
own health and family duties, to remain at home this winter. On 
an average, every forty dollars contributed opens the way for the 
admission of a student at Berea. At present the number of students 
is beyond the capacity of the building and equipment, and the 
number of applications far exceed the present possibilities of the 
college. The plan of furnishing work to students brings a threefold 
benefit — helping the students in self-support, training them indus- 
trially, and adding to the present equipment of the college. 

Bequests should be made to Trustees of Berea College, Berea, Mad- 
ison County, Kentucky. 

Checks should be made payable to Treasurer of Berea College, 
Berea, Madison County, Kentucky. 

Inquiries should be sent to President Win. Goodell Frost, Ph.D., 
Berea, Madison County, Kentucky. 



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